Has Indian media aided ban on Gandhi book?

VINUTHA MALLYA writes from Ahmedabad: The ban masters are back in business. And as usual, vibrant Gujarat leads the way, but this time the Centre is not too far behind.

Narendra Damodardas Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat and renowned terminator of artistic freedom, has just announced the State’s “ban” on the book, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India by Pulitzer-winner and former New York Times journalist, Joseph Lelyveld.

The book’s sin: to have elicited reviews that hinted at the Mahatma’s bisexuality, despite the author’s denial of it.

As the man in charge Gandhi’s homestate, “hands-on” Modi obviously couldn’t let somebody else be seen to be protecting its asmita before him. (For the record, the Congress government in Shiv Sena land, Maharashtra, too has announced a ban.)

None of the crusaders of Gandhi’s reputation have thought it worthy to read the book before publicly denouncing its content and conclusions:

“We have to think how to prevent such writings. They denigrate not only a national leader but also the nation,” said Moily.

Anyone remember Article 19? Anyone remember that Moily is both a lawyer and an author.

Modi, an old hand at ban baaja, has used this strategy in the past to his advantage: Jaswant Singh’s book on Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and his support in the unofficial banning of the films, Parzania and Fanaa, to name just two. While in the three instances, the issue was of inconvenient truths, in this case, he is angered that:

“The apostle of truth, peace and non-violence has been represented in a perverted manner”.

Appropriating Gandhi is as fashionable as “denigrating” him, it seems.

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More than the politicians pavlovian response to a book they haven’t seen, read or understood, it is the Indian media’s faithful participation in the process leading upto the ban that is the most disturbing. It is action replay of the ban on Salman Rushdie‘s Satanic Verses in 1989 based on a review of the book in India Today.

The question the Indian media need to ask themselves today is: Are reviews in Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph or The Wall Street Journal the last word on books or on Gandhi? Should we not read and make up our own mind as a mature democracy? At the very least, should we not expect the proscribers to know what they are talking about?

Gujarat’s (and Maharashtra’s) ban on the Gandhi book comes despite Lelyveld ‘s clarification that he had not said anything about Gandhi’s bi-sexuality, and that had he not claimed in his book that Gandhi was a racist.

So, what gives?

In Pratibha Nandakumar’s story of reactions from Bangaloreans in the Bangalore Mirror titled ‘Fashionable to slander Gandhi’, she states without provocation: “If this was a strategic publicity campaign, his agent gets full credit. Everybody wants to get a copy.”

At this rate, we just might not.

Lelyveld is no lightweight, fly-by-night author trying to rack up some sales by creating some buzz. He is a two-time executive editor of the New York Times whose previous tome was on apartheid in South Africa.

Yet, he finds his book banned despite his clarification to the Times of India in a story it ran on 29 March 2011.

In the ToI report, Ahmedabad-based Gandhian scholar Tridip Suhrud was reported not only to have interacted with Lelyveld when he was researching the book but also as having read it:

“He (Suhrud) is aghast with the reviews and swears by Lelyveld…. Suhrud goes on to give full marks to Lelyveld and the book. He says it is the first political biography of Gandhi by an expert on apartheid,” says the ToI report.

This did not stop the world’s most-selling English daily’s city supplement, Ahmedabad Times, from posting two pages of “reactions” from “celebrities” on 30 March. Not one of them had read the book, and of the 19 celebrities interviewed only three were aware that the author had denied having made any of the claims that were doing the rounds in the UK and US media.

The others reacted variously to what they had read in the media, that it was wrong (of the author) to talk of Gandhi in this way. A sketchy paragraph that did not clarify the issue introduced this photo feature. The paper did not make it clear to the reader that the author had denied having called Gandhi a bisexual or racist.

Nor did it differentiate between the book and the reviews, making them both sound synonymous.

One wonders if the Daily News and Analysis (DNA) had access to the book when it quoted passages in the story it ran on 28 March, or if it simply borrowed the passages from what was floating around online.

On 30 March, in a comment appearing on Hindustan Times online, the writer reproduces a quote by Suhrud that appears in the book (“They were like a couple”) by dropping a key word (“They were a couple”), completely misrepresenting Suhrud in the process. Such is the rush of the press.

In an interview to The Indian Express on 29 March, Lelyveld told journalist Mandakini Gahlot:

“The reason Western media reports are highlighting the ‘bisexual and racist’ aspect is ‘because of the atmosphere we live in where anything is plucked off and reported everywhere as news. The news aggregators are full of it this morning. There is no real reporting, people have not even read the book.”

The God is in the details though.

Whether or not the author questioned Gandhi’s sexuality, Indians have always been uncomfortable with Gandhi’s own honesty.

At a seminar on Gandhi, which was organised by the women’s studies department of NMKRV College in Bangalore in the late 1990s, two young students were at the receiving end of Gandhians’ ire. Their offence was to publicly discuss, from a feminist perspective, his nocturnal experiments with the teenaged nieces.

When they wondered aloud, just as any young woman would (should?), if he had considered the impact of his experiment on the young 17-year-old’s mind, many members in the audience stormed out of the auditorium.

No debate, no discussion.

The latest ban is proof that nothing has changed, only the players have.

Photograph: Mahatma Gandhi (left) with the jewish bodybuilder Hermann Kallenbach (right), with whom he is alleged to have shared a relationship even while being happily married.

By banning this book, we are once again proving to the entire world that we are, after all, a banana republic. No one has read the book, and they want it to be banned! This kind of ban is in complete violation of “freedom of speech.”

If Mahatma Gandhi wrote certain letters to anyone, then those letters must be allowed to emerge into public domain. I mean the Mahatma choose the title, “My Experiments with Truth” for his own book. And now his followers seem to be afraid of truth.

If they ban the book, it is going to have a very negative effect. The so-called controversial parts will get circulated on the Internet and give rise to all kinds of suspicions. As most of us will not have read the book, we will not be able to take the entire material in context.

All this will lead to unnecessary controversy. The best way out is that people should be allowed to read the book so that they can make their own judgements.

It is time the Indian politicians understood that in the age of Internet it is impossible to ban a book. The moment you announce a ban, the book becomes even more popular. Excerpts will get posted on myriad websites that people will be able to read freely.

Instead of banning, they should come up with logical arguments to refute the kind of thinking that is contained in the book called Great Soul. Not a single politician has offered a logical argument; they just want to use the “brute power” of the government to decide what people can read and what they can’t.

The power of censorship and banning should be taken away from the government.

I have read EVERY review and comment about this book and just as Joseph Lelyveld has every right to write the book so also people have to comment. MY complaint though is not against him but against the reviewers who saw too much or read too much between lines and came out with such exclamations that as i said in the write up demands a lot of explaining to do. Some headings are atrocious to say the least.
I am not for banning any book and your write up speculating if Indian media has aided the ban on the book is EXACTLY on the same level as my speculation if it is ‘fashionable to slander Gandhi?’. You forgot the question mark while quoting – which makes a hell of a difference to the tone.
I am totally with you when you take on the press for its rush.
we are Indians and the ban of the book is the mildest of our reaction. had it been one of the ‘demi-gods’ (i refuse to name) then god forbid we would be reporting a riot.

and one last thing – ‘Lelyveld may not be a lightweight, fly-by-night author trying to rack up some sales by creating some buzz’ but even the best of the top grade authors/publishers are not beyond a publicity stunt of this kind/magnitude.

I am against all bans including the ban on Joseph Moro’s book.History is full of banned books right from Lady chatterley to Stanic verses. Time has proved that all that was false. China had one time banned fairy tale books for kids. Liberty and freedom demands no ban on anything unless one violates law and the law should take its course.Why ban even smoking and drinking.We have seen the failure of prohibition and now we are after tobacco. Educate and raise public opinion and not use rod to put off information or taste.